The yak

Sometime in the fall of 1997 I ordered the plans for the Georgian Bay Kayak from Laughing Loon Kayaks in Mass.  Rob Macks is the designer, and he does an excellent job with providing complete plans, instructions, and materials sources.  Susan and I have worked on it off and on since then (it's now 2002), but when we stopped dating, it pretty much became my project.  Our friend Shane built a similar boat in a single season, but he's a maniac and I don't want to talk about that any more.  The boat is much farther along than this little blurb shows at present, but I haven't been motivated to scan the photos in. 

I plan to have it on the water by June 2002.  It's very very close to finished.

There's a lot of prep work that goes into building one of these puppies.  For instance, if you don't want to buy cedar strips precut with bead and cove edges, you have to cut them yourself.  That's what we did.  It was long work, but it gave us better control over the color of the wood that we would include in the boat since we could choose the boards ourselves.

Here's Susan pretending to rout the bead and cove edges of a strip.  Nifty set up, eh?
The routers are buried beneath the various feather boards which guide the strips into the
whirring router bits, so you can't really see them.
This set-up allowed us to cut the bead on one edge and the cove on the other edge all in one pass.

Strip boats are built by laying strips along a series of precisely oriented forms.
They are attached to the forms temporarily with staples or hot glue.
The strips are glued together along their edges to make a solid shell, which is then fiberglassed.
These forms are removed after the hull is glued up and fiberglassed
 

Here's Susan scraping excess glue after putting in one of the angled strips.
I'm not very good at getting her with a happy expression.
She's really having a good time.
No kidding.

Addendum:  As of 12/00 the yak is quite close to completion.   If you've dropped by the kitchen page you know why it's been on hold.  If you're a pal, you know why it's been on hold before that.  I'll get some photos of the progress up one of these days.

Really, I'm not kidding now.